Kingston HyperX H2O 4GB 2133MHz DDR3 CL9 Memory Kit Review

Kingston HyperX H2O 4GB 2133MHz Test Bench & Overclocking

The Kingston HyperX H2O Test Bench:

This memory is hot, and I am not talking about temperature. Running at 2133MHz is pretty fast considering the JEDEC standard for Sandy Bridge is only 1333MHz. This memory is specified to run at 800MHz above that meaning it has some of the best IC’s Kingston has to offer.

In order to play with this hot set of memory I pulled out my current test rig running a Intel Core i5-2500K ‘Sandy Bridge’ processor at stock 3.3GHz clock frequencies with a fresh install of Windows 7 Professional SP1 running the latest Windows Updates and drivers. For video I am using an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 graphics card running the latest nVidia 275.33 drivers.

The ASUS P8P67 motherboard I used has the latest 1608 bios, up to date peripheral drivers, and it was configured with turbo boost disabled and manually fixed memory speeds for each test. For storage there is a single SATA II WD 7200 RPM 500 GB drive and a LG ODD to load windows. I used an OCZ 700 watt PSU and the stock Intel cooler to finish out the bench.

Overclocking the HyperX H20:

A nice feature that Kingston has with these kits is dual XMP profiles. The first profile for this kit is 2000Mhz at 9-11-9-27 timings and the second profile is at 2133Mhz also at 9-11-9-27 timings. The reason for the two profile combination is to help those that do not have unlocked processors achieve great performance while maintaining stability. If the hot 2133Mhz profile doesn’t work you can pick the slightly lower one and know you are still rocking pretty high speed memory. Since my test bench has an unlocked i5 2500k chip I was able to utilize the hot 2133Mhz profile and boot with no problem. You can see the test results on the next page.

Before we get into the testing I wanted to see if there was any juice left in this hot kit so I tried pushing it a bit more. First I made sure the voltage was fixed at 1.65v and then picked the next frequency multiplier jump which put me at 2400Mhz.. I knew that would be really aggressive and sure enough the system would not even post giving me an instant memory error. I back down to the 2133Mhz profile and tried to tighten up the timings but even at a modest 8-11-9-27 timing I could barely get it to post. This lead me to believe this kit was about as tight as it was going to get. Next I tried pushing the BCLK a bit and hit 2138Mhz which isn’t much of an over clock but I was trying to ease into it.

With that minor success under my belt I pushed a bit more and the best I was able to pull off was 2143.6Mhz at 11-13-11-30 timings. Not much of an over clock from 2133Mhz and by having to loosen up the timings so much a few quick test told me this was actually worse than the the performance from the 2133Mhz XMP profile.

The good news is that by picking the more aggressive XMP profile at 2133MHz 9-11-9-27 you are basically at the max this memory can perform, at least on my motherboard and CPU combination that is. If you are the type that is not really into overclocking memory and just want to set it and forget it, this is a great kit. On the other hand if you like to feel like you got a bargain because you were able to squeeze out extra performance then look elsewhere as you won’t get any more juice out of this top of the line kit. You could easily say you got every bit of what you paid for with this kit.